


one another's best

by possibilityleft



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 11:05:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3172176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilityleft/pseuds/possibilityleft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Where and how did you meet your spouse?" Jake asked, glancing sideways at Holt and then back out the window.</p>
            </blockquote>





	one another's best

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cashay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cashay/gifts).



Holt and Peralta had been sitting in the unmarked car for seven very long hours when Peralta pulled another card from the deck. In the precinct's White Elephant exchange this year, Peralta had won a card game of trivia questions for getting to know other people. Holt knew that Peralta had been gunning for the bottle of liquor that someone had thrown into the pool of gifts, but he had been suspiciously not disappointed in his final prize. Now Holt knew why. Today, he had been asked about his most embarrassing moment, his fondest childhood memory, and his favorite sports team.

(His answers were, "I'd rather not say," "I'd rather keep my privacy," and "The Mets"; Jake had sighed loudly after each answer, especially the last one.)'

"Here's a good one," Jake said, holding the card up, reclining his seat again, and reading aloud. Something rattled on the floorboard. Holt tried to ignore it. He was ready for a break from the waiting. Their relief would be showing up in about an hour.

"Where and how did you meet your spouse?" Jake asked, glancing sideways at Holt and then back out the window. Holt knew the way that Jake felt about Kevin, and vice versa, even though they were learning slowly to be more courteous to each other. It was like watching a mouse dance with an elephant. (The elephant was definitely Jake, although Raymond was a bit biased.)

"That's personal," Raymond said shortly, his back ramrod straight in the ripped driver's seat, and before Jake could argue, the suspect stepped out of the building and the chase was on. After they brought him in, surprisingly unharmed considering the extraordinary number of knives he had on his person, Holt had a budget meeting, and then spent a solid hour catching up on some necessary paperwork that had piled up. Terry tried to stay on top of it for him, but he couldn't review and sign everything, nor should he. Holt liked to keep an eye on it. He corrected a few of Jake's misspellings in red ink.

"Solid B+," he said to himself -- an improvement, to be sure. Then it was time to go home to his husband.

Kevin was way better at telling the story of how they'd met, anyway. Who knows, maybe Peralta would learn it sometime.

*

The story was: like every English major, Kevin was writing a book. I was about a mild-mannered English major who was a private detective in his spare time, and he needed to do some research on police work. He'd called the precinct a number of times to see if he could get a contact, but no one had called him back. He'd come down to file a complaint about the lack of contact, and when the sergeant on desk had heard what he wanted, he'd called Raymond. Raymond always seemed to get these type of assignments, the more useless and frustrating the better. He wasn't sure why they didn't just fire him if they didn't like that he was out and proud, but perhaps they'd thought it would be easier to make him quit.

Instead, Raymond had become an expert on soothing ruffled old ladies and writing up lost cat descriptions. He wasn't going to give in so easily.

He wrote up Kevin's complaints without protest and tried to calm his nerves with a couple of jokes. It surprised him a little when Kevin laughed at them, and a lot more when Kevin asked him to dinner.

"Not for the book," Kevin said, although they did spend a little more time on shop talk than Raymond ever had with any of his previous dates. Of course, most of those dates had seen his profession as a liability rather than an asset.

Not five years later, Kevin would become one of those people. No one from work had shown up to help them move into their first apartment together, and in the precinct's Christmas party photo, it looked like they had some kind of plague, since no one would stand next to them. And of course there were the things that people called them behind their backs, as if Raymond never heard them. He never shared them with Kevin, anyway.

It had just been a chance encounter, their meeting. If Holt was a fanciful man, he could have thought of dozens of scenarios where they would have never met at all. If Kevin had come in on another day, or not at all, or if that first dinner hadn't gone so well or if Kevin's tie hadn't matched his eyes perfectly and caught Raymond's gaze... Of course, Raymond wasn't a fanciful man. He was just grateful.

"I met Kevin at work," he said to Peralta, two weeks after their seven-hour stakeout. Peralta had clearly forgotten about the conversation; his eyes darted wildly for context in a way that secretly always amused Holt.

"What, you arrested him?" Peralta asked, charging ahead and gaping comically.

"There are other reasons to meet a civilian in a police station," he said, and left it at that. Kevin's version was better. There was all this inner monologue about him as a handsome, quiet, young officer and how Kevin had found him much more interesting than the book he was soon going to quit writing in favor of his thesis. And he always said something about fate working in mysterious ways, and Raymond would have to interject, and so it went.

"You'd be surprised," Holt said to Jake, shooing him out of his office and shutting the door behind him. He sat down at his desk and sent Kevin a text message that he was thinking of him.

"Love's mysteries in souls do grow, but yet the body is his book," Kevin sent back. It was from a John Donne poem, one of Holt's favorites.

In the privacy of his office, Holt smiled, and then went back to work.


End file.
